Sir Ivan Lewis on Brexit

Everything has been dominated by Brexit this year so perhaps it might be wise to mull over nine lessons offered by Sir Ivan Lewis at a recent talk in Liverpool.  Sir Ivan used to be our top diplomat in the European Union and he obviously knows what he is talking about. 

What Does The Community Say?

One often finds campaigns of various kinds claiming to speak for "the community" as if it was monolithic.  Of course any given area of reasonable size will have a variety of opinion, especially in an area as diverse as Brent.  Here is some recent research on each ward in Brent. 

The surveys certainly threw up some surprises for me.

Volunteer Libraries Get Another round of Cuts

Bexley is apparently cutting its grants to volunteer libraries.  This is not surprising. I have always been dubious as to whether such volunteer libraries actually give value for money.  It is hard to answer that since the value is seldom measured.  It is really just a way for councillors to attempt to deflect controversy.  The danger of course is that the groups will, having kicked up a fuss to get the grant before pursue the same tactic to defend more grants sucking more and more of the limited Council budget their own way, a danegeld arrangement in other words.

Types of Rent

One of the controversies about rents and planning in Brent is what is meant by such terms as "affordable", which can often mean the opposite.  Red Brick blog has a good analysis explaining the background of the policy.  It tries to explain Sadiq Khan's attempts to navigate what has become a seriously muddled system. 

Designing Female Safety Into Cities

A long and interesting think piece on designing womens safety into urban space in the Guardian.  Many of the points made are already standard in the UK in urban design, but seldom specifically highlighted. 

The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle

I was reading recently one of the most impressive science fiction books I have come across for a long time, although it actually dates from 1957.  It is the Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, the noted cosmologist.  While not without flaws, it really impresses me in two ways.

The first is it is very successful in portraying working scientists, which is quite rare in film and fiction.  The only really successful portrayal I can recall in film is the old Dambusters film (I hope Peter Jackson's turns out as good).  Arthur C Clarke can also be convincing in the regard, and certainly was amazingly prescient.  Novels that tackle the interchange of ideas are quite difficult to pull off as Aldous Huxley.  I suppose my favourites in that line would be Thomas Love Peacock's, although some might find that too close to a set of caricatures. 

The second is its imagining of an alien life form, which I find convincing as something entirely different from us yet still conceivable as an intelligence.  The edition I have has an afterword by Richard Dawkins, who although a general admirer was a critic of the supposed origin of the creature.  Hoyle supposes it gradually forming out of a cloud, which does not strike me as absurd, and I think might be seen as a form of evolution.  However, I find it harder to imagine Hoyle's ideas of many such creatures roaming about and I am not sure that they would have any interest in procreation. 

British Museum Under Threat

The British Museum seems to be increasingly under threat of gradual dismantlement as this or that group come along to claim that objects should be returned to their countries of origin.  I dislike this whole line of approach.

Firstly many objects do not have a single national origin.  Others such as the Gweagal shield are as much a part of one country's history as another's (In that case British history as well as Australian).  Still others, like the Parthenon marbles, were created by cultures that are now only tenuously related to the modern versions that now exist in the same place.  Of course, there is an important sense in which modern Greeks descend from fifth century Athens, but there is also an important sense that all Europeans descend from Fifth century Athens.  These factors make the whole concept of a simple "return" problematic.

There is also a more important sense in which dismantling the British Museum is a bad idea.  It is a museum of interconnectedness, not just a "national museum".  The interconnectedness is the subject matter.  Something important would be lost if that went.

The Kiln Theatre Name Change

I understand that the Kiln Theatre board have now confirmed that they have no intention of reversing the name change.


As the campaign against the Kiln Theatre name change slowly peters out, the Guardian has a piece on artistic succession which is of interest.  As it points out, changing a theatre name is quite common.  It also contains the detail that White Teeth is apparently the Theatre fastest selling and highest grossing production, which is good news, although completely unsurprising.  A production based on a book by such a well known author and such a local setting was always likely to be a good drawer. 

As I have argued before, the Theatre remake is actually a really fantastic achievement in a tough environment.  It was a brave step to take, and contrary to what has been said was widely consulted on before going ahead.

UPDATE

The Our Tricycle, Not Your Kiln group has posted that it has received a "national award" from The Stage Magazine.  The citation of this award reads:

"Among several genuinely concerning controversies this year, That Bloke Who Tried to Burn an EU Flag Award for Most Pointless Protest goes to those folk who resolutely stand outside Kilburn’s Kiln Theatre, making a fuss about its perfectly fine name change and completely missing the point that a) they are needlessly harassing one of theatre’s few female, BAME artistic directors, b) they look like complete tools, and c) there are far more important things to worry about."

Do people just not read what they post or what?

YouGov Surprise on UKIP

YouGov have a poll on dislike for political parties that shows that UKIP are the most disliked of the parties tested. 

UKIP come just ahead of Sinn Fein, which is a party widely associated with a thirty year terrorist campaign that murdered large numbers of people in the British Isles. 


UPDATE


In a separate poll Peter Kellner, formerly President of YouGov, is arguing that there is now a big majority for retaining EU membership in preference to Theresa May's deal. 

Small Potatoes at Brent Council

Brent Council has been praising itself for funding small scale community projects through the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL).  In one sense that is all very well.  I am sure that these projects all do good things, but it does rather ignore the more important big spend stuff that only a Council can provide such as funding the big adult social care services, the child protection care, transport spending, the environmental services and so on.  These are where the vast majority of Council residents benefit from the Council, so why ignore them?

It also seem strange to single one particular tax, the Community Infrastructure Levy, out of all the ways the Council is funded.  It is all very well, but it does not compensate for the vast cuts the Council continues to suffer in terms of central government grant.  Is it because some people seem to feel that the CIL is in some sense not really taxpayers' money? 

Avoiding Materialism at Christmas

If you are feeling anti-capitalist in the run up to Christmas, the Guardian has a helpful round up of ways to avoid too much materialism.  Although I am surprised to see the omission of the Coop from the ethical shopping options as well as other non-shareholder propositions such as the Nationwide.  Well done on the shout out for allotments and libraries though. 

Active Borrowers and Brent Libraries

Surprisingly, given the damaging closure of Willesden Library Centre in July, the number of active borrowers seems quite close to target at 35, 176.  There were 36,421 active borrowers last year.  It remains to be seen whether the actual number of loans goes down, as I suspect it will. 

Brexit Dissolves the Government

Ministers appear to be simply ignoring the Prime Minister in her opposition to free votes.  They now want to involve MPs in the decision.  Of course plenty of people were telling them that right from the start, but they not only tried to ram everything through with a minimum of discussion, they even misled with false information.  Theresa May was complicit in all this.

Perhaps even more despicable are those like David Davis and Boris Johnson at the centre of the process who resigned late on and then pretend to have had no say.  At any rate we seem to have ended up with a mess that can only be really solved with a new General Election or a new Referendum.  I suspect the former is still unlikely, and only a new referendum offers the chance of getting out of this mad hall of mirrors. 

Until then I expect the government to stagger on a chaotic diodarchy without collective responsibility and ministers making random interventions in their departments while the real problems of the country are ignored.  Of course, if the voters voted to continue the Brexit process we will get more of the same for years and years and years. 

The Strange Fate of "The Establishment"

There was a time when "The Establishment" meant something as a term.  It was coined in the 1950s by Henry Fairlie to refer to a group of men generally Anglican and fairly wealthy who sat at the apex of traditional institutions such as the Law, the Church of England, Big Business, Politics and so on who shared a common upbringing through a small group of schools and universities and a fairly narrow bond of shared experience.

I am not sure that that kind of Establishment actually exists any more.

Not least it is hard to find anyone who admits to being part of it.  As Nick Cohen has pointed out, many of the right wingers who used to qualify actually see themselves as being in opposition to it.  Leftwing critics who also believe themselves critical outsiders seem to think it gangs up on people such a former Tory Chief Whip, who would have undoubtedly have been part of it in a past era.

I suspect what we have now are kind of "silo Establishments" where people within certain narrow groups form tightly knit groups, conspiracies against the public if you will, within sharply defined institutions such as the Police, Armed Forces etc.

Ethnic Minority Disadvantage

Ethnic minority candidates tend to get fewer votes than white candidates, according to Cowley and Kavanagh.  The article features among other Tulip Siddiq MP.

It would be interesting to learn whether particular ethnic minorities are affected more than others, and whether it is based solely on names or whether studies have been down that bring factors such as appearance into consideration. 

Universal Credit in Islington

The New Statesman has a piece on the roll out of universal credit in Islington, where as elsewhere it appears to be inflicting real damage at the lowest income people.  Islington's approach is call for the system to be entirely scrapped, whereas Brent is implementing it, and seems to have offered no view as to whether it should be paused or scrapped.  Navin Shah is an exception to this since has called for universal credit to be paused.

Plastics Reduction in Wembley

There is an interesting example of plastics waste reduction underway in Wembley.  Waste reduction is really the next major step for waste handling in West London.  Landfill is now very limited thanks to the new power plant that takes most non-recycled waste.  Although West London Waste Authority (WLWA) has had a budget for waste reduction for several years progress in reducing food waste and textile waste has been limited.  Hopefully, this plastics scheme will help start the long shift away from waste generation. 

The Spread of Racism in Britain

Those who deny the increasingly widespread and unchallenged nature of anti-Semitism might look at the response to Luciana Berger MP's position on another EU referendum.  She is posting a decision about something that has nothing to do with Israel but is a key issue for people in Liverpool and the UK.  She is in fact simply affirming the Co-operative Party's official position (She is a Labour and Co-operative MP) and she gets a mass of tweets with the standard racist tropes of dual loyalty, Israeli pay et c.

This is a disgusting way for any one to be treated, and the Labour Party should be clear that it condemns it.

National Decline of Libraries as Brent Libraries Grow.

The Guardian has noted again the sick state of public libraries in the UK.  It acknowledges that Wembley Library is the third most visited, although it fails to note the enormous growth this represents, and how it has been achieved over several years.  The contrast with the national picture of libraries now attaining 233 million visits (2017/18) compared to 276 million visits as recently as 2010 demonstrate the rapidity of decline.  A sector with a more than 18% decline in usage is in serious trouble.  The latest Guardian report also fails to not how Brent has bucked that trend as a result of the Libraries Transformation Project.

By the way, here is another reminder about the national petition against library cuts. 

Pseudo-Democracy

There is a fundamentally accurate tweet thread about the undemocratic nature of the nature of tonight's confidence motion in the sitting Prime Minister.  Many of the points made are similar to the ones I made about the attempted changes to Labour Party arrangements.